Celebrate the 40th birthday of wilderness

Walk for Wilderness

Saturday, September 11.

The Sierra Club, U.S. Forest Service, and East Bay Regional Park District are jointly hosting a gala Walk for Wilderness to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the passage and signing of the Wilderness Act. You don't have to travel to a remote wilderness to cheer our country's strongest law guarding wild, natural lands from development! The party will be based at Del Valle Regional Park (south of Livermore) - with walks into our own local regional wilderness, the Ohlone Wilderness.

Participants will have a choice of three separate walks, ranging from an easy nature trail to a strenuous up-and-down five-miler. Local Sierra Club members and the general public are all invited to come celebrate our wilderness heritage.

The registration fee for the special event includes park entrance and parking fees. Full-event registration fee, which includes commemorative tee-shirt, fanny pack, and water bottle, is $12 in advance, $17 on the day of event. Reduced registration fee, without shirt, pack, or bottle, will be $5 in advance, $7 at the event. There are also reduced rates for walkers 12 and under.

To pre-register, call the Bay Chapter office at (510) 848-0800, or Vicky Hoover or Timothy Williams (numbers below) to request a registration form, or see www.ebparks.org

Registration opens at 8 am. The strenuous five-mile hike will leave at 8:30. The shorter wilderness walk, about 2.5 miles, will leave at 9:30, and the half-mile nature-trail walk will commence at 10. Regional-park docents will guide all walks. Afterwards, at 11, a special children's entertainment begins, and at 11:30 participants will gather for brief remarks by the Forest Service and local elected officials. Refreshments will be available for sale from Urban Parks Concessionaire.

The San Francisco Bay Chapter, which is co-sponsoring the birthday party through its Wilderness Committee, will have a table at Del Valle with general Sierra Club information and fact sheets on the history and meaning of wilderness and on the current California Wild Heritage Campaign. The committee welcomes more volunteers at our table; if you'd like to help, contact Vicky Hoover at (415) 977-5527 or email vicky.hoover -at-sierraclub.org

She can provide a map and directions to the park. Information is also available from Timothy Williams, event coordinator in the U.S. Forest Service' Region 5 office in Vallejo, (707) 562-8838.

Come also to the 40th Anniversary National Wilderness Conference Oct. 10 - 13 on Lake George in the Adirondacks of New York. The conference will focus on the history, present-day realities, and future of our National Wilderness Preservation System. For information go to www.wilderness40th.org/

Also contact Jerry Sutherland at jerry.sutherland -at- comcast.net

He will be arranging a get-together for Sierra Club members at the conference.

What are we celebrating?

The Wilderness Act established our country's National Wilderness Preservation System and declared it a national policy "to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness." Wilderness is federal "lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition".

In September 1964 about nine million acres of Forest Service "primitive" and "wild" areas immediately received permanent protection, and since then, bill after bill has added more lands to wilderness. Today nearly 5% of all the public land in the U.S., more than 106 million acres in 650 areas in 44 of the 50 states, is designated wilderness. More than half of that land is in Alaska. California has 14%, or 14 million acres, of its land in wilderness.

In celebrating, wilderness activists will bring attention to all the still-unprotected wild lands that should be designated - such as the 2.5 million acres of California wild lands currently proposed by Sen. Barbara Boxer for protection in her California Wild Heritage Act. They will also point to the ruthless, persistent attacks of the Bush Administration on America's wild lands, as for example the recent gutting of the popular Clinton-era Roadless Area Conservation Rule.

Vicky Hoover